I invited Robert Gephart of the University of Alberta to reflect on his observations as a long-serving, award-winning reviewer of qualitative research for A!vII Over the past two and a half years, I have developed a tremendous respect for Bob's keen eye for evaluating qualitative research submissions, and great admiration for the painstaking advice he provides authors about how to improve their work. As a world-renowned qualitative author himself, Bob is in an excellent position to provide observations about how authors might increase the chances of having their qualitative research accepted for publication at AMI In a three-way electronic mail conversation about the challenges and opportunities of qualitative research, Bob, Tom Lee, and I all concluded that many authors with potentially very interesting data sets don't seem to know how to analyze them to their full potential. This is perhaps not surprising, gi ven the clear predominance of quantitative methods and statistics courses over qualitative ones, particularly in North America, as well as the inherently greater subjectivity involved in designing and analyzing qualitative research. As such, we encouraged Bob to provide a bit of a minitutorial-complete with reference citations and examples of high-quality papers that use particular qualitative approaches-in addition to his observations about qualitative research submitted to AMI The result is a longer-than-usual "From the Editors" column. but one that we believe is well worth the extra reading time for anyone interested in producing, reviewing, or attempting to coax greater insights from qualitative research. We are fortunate to have someone with Bob's expertise share his observations, and we hope that his thoughts will prove useful to researchers for many years to come.

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Organizationally based environmental disasters are addressed. These have generally been neglected in the social and administrative science literature. Turner's (1976, 1978) model of the organizational basis of disasters is reviewed. Basic assumptions of the model are made explicit, and the relevance of the model for understanding environmental disasters is noted. An alternative political "sensemaking" model of disasters is then proposed. The model assumes that divergent views of reality emerge in the written and verbal statements of government, industry, and public critics involved in the disasters. These views of reality compete for acceptance as the dominant reality. The political sensemaking perspective is systematically applied to two case studies of organizationally based environmental disasters; propositions are developed which summarize key features of such disasters.

Risk is an important but under-investigated feature of organizations in Late Modernity. This paper introduces the Special Issue on Organizations and Risk in Late Modernity. The rationale for the special issue is discussed. An overview of important approaches to risk research and organizations is provided to frame the special issue. These approaches include the cognitive science approach, which takes a positivist perspective and assumes that risks are objective and knowable. This view is contrasted with socio-cultural theories based in work by Mary Douglas, Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Michel Foucault. Charles Perrow's organizational theory of the production of risk and accidents due to interactive complexity, and Karl Weick's theory of risk sensemaking, are then discussed. The paper then reviews the contributions of papers in the special issue and outlines issues for future research on risk and organizations.